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People Not In Labor Force Soar By 522,000, Labor Force Participation Rate Lowest Since 1981
zerohedge.com ^ | Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/04/2012 | Tyler Durden

Posted on 05/05/2012 1:43:55 PM PDT by Iam1ru1-2

it is just getting sad now. In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000. This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.

Labor force participation Rate:

People not in labor force:



TOPICS: Government
KEYWORDS: laborforce; unemployment
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1 posted on 05/05/2012 1:43:59 PM PDT by Iam1ru1-2
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To: Iam1ru1-2

In the old days, they used to call that “cooking the books”


2 posted on 05/05/2012 1:50:35 PM PDT by CMailBag
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To: Iam1ru1-2

Obama “the America Hater” and the Democrat Party kill the USA economy and our magnificent country with it.


3 posted on 05/05/2012 1:54:26 PM PDT by JLAGRAYFOX (My only objective is defeat and destroy Obama & his Democrat Party, politically!!!)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

The new normal... this just means more people on gov assistance, hence more dem voters...


4 posted on 05/05/2012 1:54:47 PM PDT by dps.inspect (the system is rigged...)
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To: CMailBag

Unemployment figures have already been precooked.

Although to be fair why aren’t these graphs starting at zero.


5 posted on 05/05/2012 1:54:57 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Mitt! You're going to have to try harder than that to be "severely conservative" my friend.)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

but but but...Obama single handedly pulled us out of the “great recession” and personally put a bullet through Osama bin Laden’s skull. He also bravely caused gas prices to rise drastically in order to convince Americans to use less gasoline and he heroically put thousands of assault rifles in the hands of the Mexican drug Cartel in order to convince Americans that our second amendment was putting guns in the hands of dangerous criminals and fueling international violence. So...GOBAMA!


6 posted on 05/05/2012 1:57:23 PM PDT by RC one (all y'all had to do was vote for Newt but noooooo, he wasn't good enough.)
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To: dps.inspect

More and more are taking social security disability.


7 posted on 05/05/2012 1:58:58 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
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To: Iam1ru1-2

This guy has scary charts.

HTTP://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com

Wow! Look at his teen unemployment bog too.


8 posted on 05/05/2012 2:03:21 PM PDT by whitedog57
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To: CMailBag

How can the bean-counters make the claim that jobs are being “created”, when previously existing openings are DISAPPEARING at a greater rate than new positions are being offered?

The universe of hiring slots continues to shrink every day, and nobody is willing to take a chance on creating a new opening, because the attendent costs of a new hire, or of maintaining a previously existing opportunity, have risen to the point of making the most cost-effective short-term response available - just don’t hire, or fill the slot once vacated.

Whether the smart boys choose to call this phenomenon by its right name or not, this is not a recession, and hasn’t been one for a while. This is a DEPRESSION. And it affects not merely the US, it is spreading throughout the world. Perhaps, like Japan, we may be able to be poised precariously on the edge, for quite some time, but Japan is in the grips of a strange paralysis, neither able to regain balance, nor quite far enough over center to tumble into the abyss. Europe may not be so fortunate.

Strange, that the Communist country of China has become the banker of the world, and the oil-producing countries have become the brokers of commerce.


9 posted on 05/05/2012 2:11:55 PM PDT by alloysteel (It is hard to get a man to understand, when his pay depends upon his not understanding something.)
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To: whitedog57

http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/teenage-wasteland-teen-unemployment-in-u-s-at-24-9-greece-and-spain-above-51/

This is the teen unemployment charts for the US and Europe. Tell me there isn’t problems with Socialist policies.


10 posted on 05/05/2012 2:16:53 PM PDT by whitedog57
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To: Iam1ru1-2

Contrary to Obama’s new campaign slogan, his performance is nothing but “Backward!”


11 posted on 05/05/2012 2:18:45 PM PDT by AZLiberty (No tag today.)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

We need to encourage self employment and small business creation by eliminating all the taxes on them and most of the regulation. In the middle I would eliminate the idiotic taxes on manufacturing. At the top I would slash taxes to a minimum.


12 posted on 05/05/2012 2:32:20 PM PDT by cripplecreek (What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

Several notes on the latest BS from the BLS (Bureau of Lies & Statistics). First, every year 1.5 - 2 million people are not added to the workforce because they graduate from high school (and don’t go to college) and graduate from college and don’t get jobs. But because they didn’t work after high school or college, they can’t draw unemployment and won’t get added until they get a job and lose it. Second, the feds are approving just about any alleged disability (including lisps, back pain, stress, etc.) for SS disability. You see the lawyer ads on TV all the time. Third, many highly educated people are holding jobs way below what their education would justify. In fact you see advertisements from the government showing the extremely low unemployment rate for college grads compared to high school grads. What they don’t say is that a significant number of the college grads are holding jobs that only require a high school degree or less. You would be surprised at the number of restaurants that have large amount of their servers with college undergraduate and graduate degrees.


13 posted on 05/05/2012 2:49:21 PM PDT by RetiredTexasVet (There's a pill for just about everything ... except stupid!)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

again, please tell me how “people not in labor force” are counted.


14 posted on 05/05/2012 2:56:58 PM PDT by the invisib1e hand
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To: RetiredTexasVet
Several notes on the latest BS from the BLS (Bureau of Lies & Statistics). First, every year 1.5 - 2 million people are not added to the workforce because they graduate from high school (and don’t go to college) and graduate from college and don’t get jobs. But because they didn’t work after high school or college, they can’t draw unemployment and won’t get added until they get a job and lose it. Second, the feds are approving just about any alleged disability (including lisps, back pain, stress, etc.) for SS disability. You see the lawyer ads on TV all the time. Third, many highly educated people are holding jobs way below what their education would justify. In fact you see advertisements from the government showing the extremely low unemployment rate for college grads compared to high school grads. What they don’t say is that a significant number of the college grads are holding jobs that only require a high school degree or less. You would be surprised at the number of restaurants that have large amount of their servers with college undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Well, there is one prevailing welfare theory where if there are not enough jobs to go around, put people on welfare, extended unemployment and/or disability because if you don't, they will revolt or riot without any income, a place to stay and in some cases, a vehicle. Maybe keeping them pacified that way is the truth, but we all know the money has to come from somewhere, us workers. The downside is that as you put more people onto the government dole, you take one person out of the labor market and over time, your labor base will shrink and as we know, it will not be able to pay to keep those on the dole collecting plus every other thing the government does, Constitutional or unConstitutional. We already have too many people in the wagon and not enough pulling it.

I used to work in IT but now I work in auto parts.
15 posted on 05/05/2012 2:58:51 PM PDT by Nowhere Man (General James Mattoon Scott, where are you when we need you? We need a regime change.)
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To: Iam1ru1-2

Labor Force Participation Rate...that’s a much better stat to represent the state of employment in the US, IMO. Of course, all stats can be ‘massaged’, but the crappy a$$ unemployment rate being tossed around for the last 40 years or so, is not even a good measure for the libtards...regardless of how much 0bama and the marxists cook the books.


16 posted on 05/05/2012 3:12:40 PM PDT by PubliusMM (RKBA; a matter of fact, not opinion. 01-20-2013: Change we can look forward to.)
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To: the invisib1e hand
again, please tell me how “people not in labor force” are counted.

As I understand it, the government sends out questionnaires to some 60,000 households each month. One of the questions asks if there is anyone unemployed living there and has that person actively looked for work in the last four weeks.

If there is someone unemployed and that person has not actively sought employment, then he's out of the workforce, baby.

17 posted on 05/05/2012 3:19:11 PM PDT by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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To: BfloGuy

does this include retiring persons?


18 posted on 05/05/2012 3:30:25 PM PDT by Chickensoup (In the 20th century 200 million people were killed by their own governments.)
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To: alloysteel

Of course, the economy creates jobs. The government destroys jobs. The Obama Administration just ignores the jobs that it destroys and takes credit for any job that any private employer creates despite Administration policies (and all nominally private sector jobs that result from government kickbacks, contracts, and corruption). The number of jobs destroyed but ignored vastly exceeds the number created and touted.

The unemployment rate officially dropped because more Americans quit looking for work: they joined the legions of homeless, starved to death, signed themselves onto the welfare rolls, joined the incarcerated population, or whatever.

In fairness, some people dropped the labor force voluntarily: early retirements and stay-at-home mothers. This latter phenomenon represents a positive development for our country, especially if the mothers in question have gainfully employed husbands.


19 posted on 05/05/2012 3:47:34 PM PDT by dufekin (Obama and Pelosi: at war against the Church--and innocent American babies)
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To: Chickensoup
does this include retiring persons?

Yes. But the point is that there are many fewer actually retiring than the administration and the media would have us believe.

20 posted on 05/05/2012 4:04:13 PM PDT by BfloGuy (The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.)
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